Power-Efficiency Data Gathering Schemes for Wireless Sensor Networks

We develop energy-efficiency data gathering schemes for wireless sensor networks (WSN), where the channel is characterized by the slow Rayleigh fading. We consider the homogeneous WSN which consists of a large number of sensor nodes equipped with the identical hardware. In the WSN, the sensor nodes are distributed randomly in a specific area. A mobile base station periodically stops by the area to collect the data from the senor nodes. Energy efficiency, which is the performance metric we adopt for our scheme design, is defined as the energy consumption by transmitting a bit sensing information. We develop analytical models to study the proposed data gathering schemes. First, we demonstrate that clustering and data-fusion technology can help improve the energy efficiency compared to the naive data gathering scheme where the sensor nodes send sensing data directly to the mobile base station. Second, we show that making full use of the channel state information (CSI) can further reduce the energy consumption for data gathering. Finally, we found that there is a tradeoff between the energy consumption and the data gathering delay.